To feel relieved the school has now completely banned phones

Well when we where at school you would have gone to the bus stop, it wouldn't have turned up. Maybe another bus drive may have told you the issue (they have radios). You would have therefore gone home. Either a parent could have taken you to school if available or you just wouldn't be able to go.

This did actually happen to me when at college once. Luckily my dad was still home and could take me a friend to college. She would have happily just not gone in that day.

You realise feature mobiles aka brick phones existed before smartphones.
You realise this ban isn't just talking about smartphone but all mobile phones.

There was a phase when kids were using blackberries because of the full keyboards and quicker to text before the smartphone era.

And prior to that it was basic phones the Nokia 5110 and the like were marketed at kids with the changing faceplates it came out in 98.

Yes the world was very different 30 years ago.

nowadays non attendance results in a fine for the parents and no school accepts transport problems as a reason. My DD was marked as late when the whole train system went down and she had to get 3 buses and was an hour late. Still got the late marker regardless despite the fact it wasn’t poor planning or setting off late- just bad luck.

This shows you don't know how things work in schools anymore. Schools now have to employ additional staff to do just that. No they don't sit outside every classroom, they are oncall with a tablet where they get emails from staff to come remove children from the classroom. You need more then one member of staff doing this all the time.

This wasn't a thing when I was at school. There was no one to come remove students.

Well DD did go in. Every single time, because she had a phone to sort it out with.

Someone has just mentioned going back to the house and calling.
Around 53% of houses in the uk do not have a landline.

Indeed they won't be punished if they don't use them at school; but they have lost a useful everyday communication facility, meaning they can't even use them appropriately anymore (unless they're the kids because of whom the rules were brought in in the first place, who largely don't bother about rules anyway - they'll still be fine).

Even today, we don't know if our DS's regular after-school club is on, as we've had no notice one way or the other and they've obviously only just started back in the new year. When they had the sensible rule, he would have asked in the morning (it's run by his class tutor) and sent us a message at break time. Now, we (and probably every other parent whose child does the activity) can either bother the reception staff, who will then have stop what they're doing take the call, go in search of the teacher and disrupt her teaching, and then call us back again. All that hassle to replace one 10-second text, to appease the sheep-like cult of 'phones are always bad for teenagers'.

Do you like being informed about schedules and timetable changes, and having simple ways to check timings and details when planning mundane tasks; or do you prefer to just have to guess and find out what actually happens once it does (or doesn't)? Do you find life more exciting when you go to the bother of going to and turning up at a place that may not be open, to buy/collect something that may have sold out? Plenty of us have more going on and don't have the luxury of the spare time to faff about living like that.

Fair enough, I don't work in a school, so I don't know the exact mechanisms of how things work and who does what. But what I am confident of is that, even if schools installed a magic powerful phone magnet that would automatically confiscate every single phone on the premises, those staff who are there to enforce discipline would still be very much needed.

Poorly-behaved children will behave poorly whether they have phones or not. Well-behaved children will behave well, whether they have phones or not. It's not the phones that are the problem; it's the people who choose to use them inappropriately. The only way to guarantee that there will be no badly-behaved children in schools would be to ban children from schools.

...and you say they use a tablet (which is basically a slightly bigger phone) to communicate with other people in the same building? When they're firmly trying to teach the children the lesson that phones are harmful and unnecessary, and it's perfectly possible to communicate verbally or using pen and paper instead? Interesting!

Indeed. And traditional landlines won't actually exist anymore within a matter of months - because they're obsolete old tech that has been replaced by better new tech. Going home, to phone from there, will now just mean somebody using a mobile phone at home.

Society as a whole has moved with the times, but schools are now having to deny this and pretend that standard modern comms methods are inherently bad, and must be resisted and avoided at all costs, like they used to (rightly) teach about cigarettes. There's no nuance or care about teaching wisdom around their use at all.

Our home phone has been an Internet phone for a couple of years.
Does that mean even more phone boxes will disappear along with the copper cables?

My husband and I both work. People talk about the 'latchkey' kids of the 80s and I was a child then but we had a close-knit neighbourhood where we were in and out of other people's houses and there were loads of places we could go in a bind.
My ds (12) sometimes takes a key, but if there was a major disruption on the roads or rail he might find himself locked out when he didn't think he would be or he could lose his key and have no way to tell us. Or sports or music clubs change at short notice... he has to go or not go differently to what he thought.

I would also like him to be able to go to friends' houses after school or play basketball at the community centre but I'd like to know where he is.
Say what you like but society WOULD judge me/us if I didn't know where my young teen was between 3:30 and 6pm.

Plus , how is that, or worse, not going DD at all more independent, resilient and resourceful than her sorting herself out?As a 13/14 yo as well, not a college kid.

It’s not just society! I want to know where my child is too and give them an age appropriate level of spontaneity - not choose between them.

The whole thing is backside forward.

The Parental Control laws mean children on their 13th birthday 🎂 have the right to remove Parental Controls.
Some kids might have only had a phone a few months at that point in time. If they get one at the start of secondary.

That is the law which needs to change. It should be 16 at a minimum.
Parents should be able to set downtime on phones while kids are in school. And select which apps they are allowed.

That will also help the kids who don't have conventional house with 2.4 children. The kids in care, the kids who live between multiple houses.

In theory, the few phone boxes that remain are connected up in the system, and so the copper wire could be easily replaced with fibre... but considering the costs and work that that would involve, along with the almost non-existent use of phone boxes, it would naturally provide the perfect opportunity to decide conclusively that they should just be got rid of for good.

Potentially, if they did keep them and replace them all with new internet-ready fibre, they could offer a suite of internet-based experiences in the phone boxes, such as email, checking social media, surfing etc... but considering that the phones in everybody's pockets which replaced the basic purposes of phone boxes - and led to their disuse - can also do all of that already, they'd just end up as much higher-tech versions of the mini graveyards that they already are.

This is it precisely. We don't instantly transition from being a fully-dependent little child into a fully-independent adult. Our adolescent years are a crucial time for us to develop and learn so much of what we will need to know for the rest of our lives, but in a secure context of having parents, teachers and other adults there to guide us, teach us discipline and steer/force us towards making good choices.

Mobile phones are a prime example of this - and indeed a marvellous learning tool. I believe that people who want to simply remove them from young people and just tell them NO - rather than guiding (and enforcing where necessary) good choices as to when and how they are used - are seeking to infantilise their children, rather than putting the effort in to actually do their jobs as parents (or in loco parentis), to steer and prepare them properly. I'd wonder what other areas of life they're neglecting to properly teach their teenagers about as well. For example, are they banning them from ever going online - even on the family computer at home - giving them free and unsupervised access; or taking the time to establish a framework to nurture this vital modern life skill in a sensible and practical way?

I cant even pretend to try and keep up with these walls of text anymore.

Your child does not need a phone at school. If a club hasn't communicated it has started, assume it has not. Or tell him to ask the day before rather than morning of rather than blaming office staff for neither of you planning ahead.

What I do isn't relevant, because I am not a school child. Adults and children have different rights and responsibilities. I do however, manage to leave my phone alone at work.

That makes a lot of sense.
Youve got me thinking the only places phone boxes are likely to survive will be main transport hubs, mainly for tourists and taxis (tourists who's phones don't have UK roaming)
But even at that WiFi calling is a thing.

the head gave a party line. My sister in law, speaking privately told the truth. Just accept you’re wrong.

and the part of your parenting that’s weak is you want a blanket ban on phones so your baby doesn’t risk feeling left out. Your words

Well the only other option of communication would be to have every teacher have a radio, which would probably wouldn't work. They need to be able to respond promptly to disruption.

You say those students would misbehave anyway. I've seen the difference bring in a no phones policy has made in our school and it's huge. When I first started they didn't have a policy and most students just stood staring at their phones all break and lunch. They now actually talk to each other.
I'm hopping bring in the pouches puts an end to students disappearing during loo breaks as they sneak them out of class.

Also technologies are tools, if used in productive ways they can be positive. Students use laptops and computers at school all the time. But school software and Internet use is strongly policed. Some of the websites it blocks can be odd though. I've had to get IT to unlock a few.

I don't see how they have authority to ban phones anywhere outside of school, aka the journey to and from school.
Fine if they have to be put in lockers during school day.

Schools seem to be a law into themselves.

Including the nonsense over what age children can walk home alone, which seems to be an English rather than Scottish thing.

But if the phone is off in the bag I don't see how school would even know its there. They aren't exactly going to go looking for it.

I'm hoping bring in the pouches puts an end to students disappearing during loo breaks as they sneak them out of class

So was I, @MigGirl, until it was suggested on here that they take in an old superseded phone for putting in the pouch and hang on to the "real" one

Depressing, isn't it?

That's what's happening at the high school near us - the kids looking to find a way around the policy will find one so the whole thing is only punishing the good kids who likely aren't even the ones creating an issue.

I'm livid that they spent the money to purchase pouches at our school - they come in October. What a total waste of resources.

No method would be 100% effective.